So whatdaya say we do away with all these "tense" questions? My son was born with Spidey verb-tense sense. Doesn't know Rule One. Let's just tell everybody you're born with it or you're not. That seems accurate enough.

@tchrist - I belive every really bad or really good thing said about me. I refuse to be mediocre. There is no cure for that.

Regular concord is that you just look at the words. So a lot has to be singular. Always. Because it's a lot. One lot. So it must be a lot of people is. Never a lot of people are.

Notional concord is when you look at the meaning of the phrase as a whole, rather than that of the individual words it's comprised of. So a lot of people is clearly plural, even though it's just a lot. And so we say "a lot of people are" and not "a lot of people is".

Similarly for each.

Traditionally, each is clearly singular. Each person is. Not each person are.

Now, what I really want to do is put the comma under the quotation mark, or perhaps combine the comma with the question mark. Both of those would be easy if only I were writing my answer on a typewriter.

It was really cool. It had an "auto return" feature, where, once you get close to the right margin, it automatically moves to the next line. You can just keep typing without worrying about hitting return whenever you hear the bell!

@TerranSwett True story time: that was my very first job on the side as a translator.

I would be working in that copy shop, photocopying shit for people — and we're not talking "shit" as in "stuff", we're talking "shit" as in "shit" —, and that one elderly gentleman would come in and ask me to translate into German a book of Armenian jokes that he had in Russian.

And he'd give me like a week's worth time.

And I would just translate them on-the-fly, using that non-eclectic typewriter — and even if I had made a mistake or had thought of a better wording, I'd just press backspace a couple times and type it anew, and only once I'd pressed Enter it would actually type it. And he'd pay me 50 Deutschmarks a-page.